Using Social Media to recruit for Cancer Clinical Trials

Richard Schilsky in Science Translational Medicine describes the challenges of enrolling patients into ever more complex cancer clinical trials. It is estimated that only 3-5% of cancer patients participate in clinical trials. Can social media be used to overcome barriers to enrollment?

There are many barriers to enrollment such as a lack of incentive by the physician if they can prescribe the drug off-label and obtain reimbursement, the additional legal liability, time required for research documentation and the need to follow human protection requirements such as informed consent and obtain Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval.

There’s also the issue of equipoise, the uncertainty as to whether a new treatment will be beneficial or not and the need to discuss with a patient their willingness to accept the risk that a new treatment may offer less benefit than the current standard of care. This topic is beyond the scope of this post.

Schilsky notes in his commentary that:

“trial start-up times have lengthened to an average of 2 years or longer, up to 40% of cooperative group phase III trials have failed to complete accrual and closed without achieving study endpoints, wasting the contribution of those patients willing to enroll in the trial.”

Time to market is key to the success of biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry, with product life governed by patent years. Delays in time to market have a real ROI impact, and may lead to promising products being discontinued prematurely.

One of the barriers to enrollment noted in Schilsky’s highlights is “insufficient patient awareness/demand.” Can social media play a role in overcoming this?

To look at what is happening currently, I used Storify, a new tool that allows you to create stories using social media: